Tuesday, August 21, 2012

RSS readers: Google Reader

G-reader
(as i will notice it her in all the postings )is a web/server based
solution to reading to the news , thus a portable solution if you work
in more than 2 PCs .It is One of the 'programs' i use intermittently
for more than 4 years with more than 100 subscriptions in total . The
only requirement is an account in Google or Blogger (blogspot)

Although I can do a very detailed review for this superb ‘product’ i will post minimal overview of its features

It
is a simplistic yet very powerful reader, windows explorer like web 2
program, with subscriptions toolbar pane on the left and the viewer on
the right . It is simple: each 'file' is just a subscription and a
folder is list of them

It supports drag and drop subscriptions and directories.

Google reader offers two views :
-the headline view with just the title the time and the feed
-detailed view with full or partial feed view – considering the site allows this
-
a nice plug-in called “Super Full Feeds for Google Reader”adds full
feed retrieval in Chrome only . Latest version promotes all partial
feeds to be retrieved. There are however some peculiar cases showing
parts of the site’s code and in several cases the start of the feed is
truncated
- There is sorting facility by time by ascending time
and by magic (i never understood what is that but seems to mix the
dates )
-in the detailed view there are also several other facilities on the bottom bar:
share your news (also add your comments )an old facility that recently stopped
posting to Google plus (new facility)
posting to Facebook or other social sites (possibly new facility) – adjustable with carets
starring (or bookmaking ) : they are sorted by the time starred . very good to filter out your most important ones
labelling / tagging : bookmaking by labels. Notice that the directories
are also marked as labels and using these as labels you lose all tagged
material . It happened to me ! Therefore you have to use new names to
save them …

Some other nice facilities:
- trends : what you have read o far , and how much
- similar pages /feeds /suggestions to add for subscription
-create badges : make some of your directories public , or adjust
‘packets’ from your subscriptions . The latest 10 postings are shown
only !
-exporting your feed sites - for other programs
-alerts
, a facility from Google search to involve your email or the reader to
get the latest postings from internet for any subject you are
interested !
Search your feeds

As you may understand Google reader is one still the best readers on the market and was quite low in memory .
But on their last version they added:
-
Thumbs of every subscription , as the mark shown at the left of the
address bar . Also some redesign of the page . This made the reader to
increase hugely the browser’s memory and if you looked for more than
200 feeds with pictures the RAM’s memory could rise to 500 MB !! A
refresh causes the browser to freeze and required more than 50 seconds
to return back to operation ….

As of 29 November mid night
local time a new change has been made in the view disallowing multiple
feed selections. Tested in 2 computers and 6 browser versions!!!!
For
me who depends heavily on reading off-computer is meant like as
disaster This is the reason I was trying to find another solution to
replace G-reader for 2 computers!

Verdict : 10 Possibly the
easier news reader with lots of interesting features and very high
popularity . 10 but for me now without the 1 !! (due to my demands-
this is an old Greek expression )